All things old China - books, anecdotes, stories, podcasts, factoids & ramblings from the author Paul French
The logo of the Vienna Bakery. There were a number of businesses called the Vienna Bakery in Shanghai over the decades, dating back to the start of the twentieth century. This though is from 1946 and was the Vienna Bakery on, I think, Broadway (Daming Lu)…
Now, thanks to Katya Knyazeva, up on the internet archive….click here
For German reading fans of Emily Hahn…Shanghai Magic, Hahn’s reporting for the New Yorker has been reissued in a new edition…..
Amy Matthewson’s Cartooning China is recently published…
This book explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841-1901.
Filled with political metaphors and racial stereotypes, these illustrations served as a powerful tool in both reflecting and shaping notions and attitudes towards China at a tumultuous time in Sino-British history. A close reading of both the visual and textual satires in Punch reveals how a section of British society visualised and negotiated with China as well as Britain’s position in the global community. By contextualising Punch’s cartoons within the broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and political discourse, the author engages in a critical enquiry of popular culture and its engagements with race, geopolitical propaganda, and public consciousness.
With a wide array of illustrations, this book in the Global Perspectives in Comics Studies series will be an important resource for scholars and researchers of cultural studies, political history and Empire, Chinese studies, popular culture, Victoriana, as well as media studies. It will also be of interest to readers who want to learn more about Punch, its history, and Sino-British relations.
My four-part podcast, The Lady from Hong Kong, uncovering the true case of Miss Seto Gin, arrested for smuggling opium in San Francisco in 1939, who got her into that situation, why escaping a wartorn China made people desparate and what happened to her and her lover/drug kingpin Chung Lei. Recorded for RTHK3 Hong Kong…
As i mentioned yesterday this year books published in 1926 come into the public domain. See Gowen & Hall’s Outline History of China here and Elizabeth Crump-Enders Temple Bells & Silver Sails here. Another is Thomas Steep’s Chinese Fantastics, first published by Century in 1925, a somewhat entertaing engagingly written account of early 1920s China. the book claims to be a guide ‘how to understand and interpret the Orient’.
As a young man Cincinnati-born Steep was sent as a reporter on a roving tour of ther American South, then to Cuba and then to cover the 1905 Russo-Japanese War. The London Mail then sent him to cover the political upheavals in Mexico around Diaz and Pancho Villa. He then went to China as a reporter with the Associated Press before joining the staff of the New York Herald Tribune.
Yesterday i noted that Gowen & Hall’s Outline of the History of China was now in the public domain. Today a more evocative piece of writing. Elizabeth Crump Enders’s Temple Bells and Silver Sails, first published in the USA by White Lotus in 1925 and then another edition from D. Appleton in spring 1926.
Crump Enders had published before, a book called Swinging Lanterns. Both are travel memoirs and Crump Enders lived in Shanghai and Peking for a time and travelled extensively throughout Tibet in the 1930s.
Crump Enders, from West Lafayette, had been a volunteer nurse in France during WW1 where she met her husband, Iowan, Gordon Enders, a pilot. After the war they travelled pretty much constantly, in China, Latin America, India and Afghanistan, until her death in 1961. Gordon at one point became an adviser to the Panchen Lama, served in the Shanghai Volunteer Corps and represented various American and European businesses in China. Gordon wrote his own book, Foreign Devil, in the 1940s.
An Episcopal minister, Dr. Herbert H. Gowen served in the department of Oriental Studies at the University of Washington (UW) teaching from 1909 until 1944. Josef Washington Hall was better known to newspaper rewaders as Upton Close. He was one of the best known correspojndfents in China during the 1920s (see my history of foreign correspodnents, Through the Looking Glass, for more on him).
Outline History of China was published in 1926 by D. Appleton and Company of New York and comes into the public domain this year.
